Italy in the News

It felt to many as if an old friend had died. Rome’s L’Unità, the newspaper that served as the bible of the Italian left and the official mouthpiece of the largest Communist Party in the West, announced its closure in early August.

Nilde Iotti, Italy’s leftist lawmaker who died in December at 79, was renowned for her regal manner. Nicknamed “the Red Queen” and “Czarina,” Iotti once described herself as “just a woman who has a difficult job—and tries to do it with tact.”